I just read Getting Real book and I really liked it. It was written by guys at 37 Signals, creators of Ruby on Rails and a series of successful online services. The book is about how to be more practical by staying simple and focusing only on currently problems. Among other things it shows that by doing less you can be more productive.

In other words most of the crap we are doing, or I'm doing, doesn't really matter and has no real effect on my life. I agree with that. I knew about the concept for a long time, but was never able to do much about it. After reading the book and thinking about it I'm starting to get it (maybe).

Doing less is doing just enough, not everything. There's no perfect or complete state.

People often talk about Pareto principle. In the context of this post it means 20% of all actions produce 80% of the value. According to it I just need to focus on that valuable 20% of the actions. I always understood this principle, but could never apply it practically. It's an interesting concept, but I must be missing something.

Solving only problems at hand seems more practical and easier to do. When I first saw the idea I thought, "Don't I always try to solve problems at hand?" As I read and learned about it, I realized that, no, not really. I make several mistakes.

• Try to optimize my time by solving problems early. Cost of most problems grows over time, but most of the problems I think of never happen or are completely different in reality than I thought they are.
• I act on what's urgent. In many cases urgent isn't important, but I'm afraid to lose an opportunity. What I came to realize is that many things that appear urgent, are not urgent at all and can be done at any time.
• Do something without understanding of what I'm trying to do. I try not to do that anymore :)

I don't fully agree with the book on solving problems as they appear. We can anticipate for them to happen and do something early to make it easier to solve them in the future. In a way it's prevention instead of solving something that isn't real yet.

With software development I try to follow good design practices to make my code easier to understand and maintain. When I don't, I usually need to go back and change it later on, thus increasing the total cost. If I don't separate concepts and make sure my classes are independent it's hard to replace an algorithm later when I run into performance problems or switch to database from using files. Speaking about performance, premature optimization can be bad, but if I don't think about it at all until I'm having problems I can push myself into a dead-end and have to rewrite large portions of the program.

Normal life (like I have any) is the same way actually. I can't solve all my health problems, but I can help prevent them and make it easier to handle them if they appear by eating healthy and exercising.

Don't solve problems you don't have, let that which doesn't matter slide, but don't completely close your eyes. Problems will appear. Be flexible, expect the problems to happen, expect that you will have to change your code. Most importantly, be smart about it. It's possible to go too far with anything, prevention including. Be practical and stay real, and do less, just what's really important.